The California Stem Cell Agency and its Mysteries of Fiscal Alchemy

In just four business days, the $3 billion California stem cell agency is going to perform a bit of financial alchemy. But like most alchemists, its methods are less than transparent.

The case in point involves a session of the intellectual property subcommittee of the agency’s board of directors. The committee is scheduled to meet next Thursday to deal with an unknown amount of cash that the agency has given to an unidentified recipient.

According to the very limited information on the meeting agenda, the cash was once a loan. But that loan has been forgiven by the agency. Now the plan is to turn that forgiven loan into a grant.

Why? How much money is involved? What is the rationale? What is the benefit to the people of California, if any? It is all something of a mystery.

Also on the agenda are unspecified changes in the “loan election policy” for clinical awards, a program that is budgeted for $100 million this year. Again, no rationale or explanation is publicly available as of this morning.

One of the favorite words of agency’s president, Randy Mills, is clarity. He reminds folks regularly that the agency should have clarity in what it does.

Mills has indeed improved the clarity of the organization in his one-year tenure at the California Institute for Regenerative Medicine, as the agency is formally known. He has brought analytic and presentation skills that have opened new insights into how the organization spends the taxpayers’ billions.  The result has been an improvement in the way the agency operates.

But in this case, the agency is falling short. Its rules call for notifying the public about meetings 10 calendar days in advance of the sessions. However, cryptic agendas that raise more questions than answers do not add up to clarity. Instead, they are opaque and can generate suspicions about the conduct of the agency on the part of the public and interested parties.

Trust in government – and the stem cell agency is part of our government – is at all-time lows. It behooves the California stem cell agency to do what it can avoid feeding that distrust and to make its operations as transparent and open as possible.

Looking for Clarity at the $3 Billion California Stem Cell Agency

OAKLAND, Ca. -- Scientists and others seeking the short version of the plans for funding of basic and translational research by the $3 billion California stem cell agency should look no further than an 18-page Power Point presentation.

The explanation is available on the agency’s Web site and in some ways is better than the more prolix description offered in three formal memos. While the presentation offers a fast read, seriously interested parties will need to plow through all three documents. (See here, here and here.)

Critical to understand the direction of the agency, however, is another Power Point presentation -- this one by Randy Mills and which is not supported by a memo or other formal document. But some of what Mills lays out in the slides has been brought up at earlier meetings, the voluminous transcripts of which are available on the agency’s Web site, if you can find them.

A search of the agency’s Web site late yesterday using the term “transcript” turned up 879 results. No transcripts of remarks by Mills or of meetings of the agency’s board of directors were found in the first 14 pages of the results.

In his slides today, Mills is covering his thinking on both basic and translational funding and how therapy development should have a continuous and predictable pathway. He likes to talk about it in terms of rail lines, a homely but apt analogy.   

While we are on the subject of Power Point presentations, the agency’s slides have improved greatly since Mills became president of the agency in May 2014.  Nonetheless, Power Point presentations do not necessarily enhance understanding, especially when the presenters do little more than read the notes on the slides. The result is known as “Death by PowerPoint!”

Slides are no replacement for a single, nuanced, written explanation of a proposal, including charts, something more than the agency usually offers in its memos to the board. That said, their memos have also improved and are more comprehensive and straight forward than under the regime of the agency’s former president, Alan Trounson.